Studying the “Desert Kites” at a Global Scale

The GLOBALKITES research project was financed by the French Research Agency (ANR). It has several important collaborations with international institutions and academics. It proposes to define the variability, dating, distribution and functionality of major archaeological stone-made structures called “desert kites”. Often considered as hunting traps, the kites could have been also used for animal domestication. In a broader archaeological context, where kites seem to have been used from the Neolithic to sub-contemporaneous times, we propose an interdisciplinary approach at the crossings of anthropology (archeology and ethnology), geomatics and geoarchaeological and bioarchaeological sciences.